Inpher CEO Dr. Jordan Brandt testifies before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee on “AI and the Evolution of Cloud Computing”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On October 18, 2019, Inpher CEO Dr. Jordan Brandt testified before the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee at a hearing entitled “AI and the Evolution of Cloud Computing: Evaluating How Financial Data is Stored, Protected, and Maintained by Cloud Providers.”

Dr. Brandt was invited onto a panel of expert witnesses to explain how privacy-enhancing technologies can address privacy and security risks inherent in the centralization of data for AI and cloud services. Dr. Brandt’s testimony is available in full text on the Financial Services Committee website and was covered by Compliance Week. A select excerpt of his testimony reads:

“Whereas cloud computing and AI pose distinct risks, a common theme applies to both; don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. The consolidation of sensitive personal information into any individual entity, to be mined by data-hungry AI algorithms, poses significant economic risks and an existential threat to the privacy of our citizens. Fortunately, the emergence of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), and specifically encryption in-use capabilities, can address the concerns of both cloud data security and privacy in AI.”

Dr. Brandt underscored that privacy-enhancing technologies — such as fully homomorphic encryption and secure multiparty computation — offer quantifiable safeguards against financial data breaches:

“As banks move more of their data and information processing to the cloud, they are effectively consolidating risk into a select few providers of cloud computing infrastructure. The magnitude of this risk was underscored by the recent Capital One cloud hack. The breach could have been prevented by securely computing across distributed data in a multi-cloud architecture, in which data is processed without exposing the underlying personal information. This would have eliminated a single point of failure.”

AI, cloud computing, and data protection are at the forefront of regulatory, legal, and compliance debates. Inpher’s Secret Computing® products enable AI and advanced analytics while alleviating data privacy risks. If you want to learn more about how your organization can leverage Secret Computing®, reach out to us!